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  • Everything Is Not Neoliberalism
  • Bruce Robbins (bio)

Neoliberalism is a striking example of the sort of political concept that refusers of the hermeneutics of suspicion tend to view with suspicion and that postcritiquers tend to critique. As a go-to context for habitual contextualizers, the concept has been arousing exasperation for years. It always seems to be discoverable lurking behind or beneath whatever piece of culture happens to be under discussion, and once discovered, it never seems all that enlightening, perhaps because it is so taken for granted, and perhaps because, like capitalism itself, it has been pulled and stretched so as to signify too many different things. The Social Text issue Genres of Neoliberalism announced in 2013 that it was dealing with "neoliberalism fatigue" by investigating "potential alternatives to the cycle of novelty and boredom" that had left scholars complaining so bitterly about the term (Elliott and Harkins 2). By the next year, the term had appeared on an MLA panel entitled "Kill This Keyword!" The introduction to Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture (2017) begins by proclaiming its doubts about the usefulness of its titular object: "it can feel as if one is trying to convincingly articulate the relationship between literature and the Sasquatch" (Huehls and Smith 1). But the doubts begin even earlier, on the acknowledgments page, where we learn that Walter Benn Michaels's contribution, entitled "Fifty Shades of Neoliberal Love," had first appeared (in the Los Angeles Review of Books and in condensed form) as "Fifty Shades of Libertarian Love." So neoliberal can sit in for libertarian without missing a beat?

Uncertainty about neoliberalism's coherence and argumentative utility is never entirely dispelled by what follows, impressively smart and creative as the book's takes on its subject overwhelmingly are. The case is not clinched when the editors cite the large number [End Page 840] of times the term has been referred to. (Bill Dunn, arguing in 2017 in favor of dropping it, noted that "well over 400,000 academic publications" had made use of it [436].) People are not always very discriminating in the terms they reach for. For some, vagueness is a virtue.

Having acknowledged a definitional problem, the editors' introduction tries to solve it by historicizing it away. Mitchum Huehls and Rachel Greenwald Smith lay out the story of neoliberalism in four phases. Their first phase is "economic": it starts in 1971, with the untethering of the dollar from gold and the freeing of transnational capital flows thus permitted. (Note that this omits the earlier theorists—I am not sure why.) The second phase is "political"; here Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher "transform these economic principles into the dominant political ideology of the 1980s," and literature begins to address the new political givens (6). The third phase, the "sociocultural," is located in the 1990s. It is defined by neoliberalism's movement "from political ideology to normative common sense" (8). Here it becomes possible to talk in greater detail about the reflection of neoliberalism in fiction and poetry, as in subjectivity generally. The final phase, which is presented as defining the period we have inhabited since about 2000, is labeled "ontological." The idea here is that neoliberalism "becomes what we are, a mode of existence defined by individual selfresponsibility, entrepreneurial action, and the maximization of human capital" (9). Now, in short, "the market and its bottom-line logic are everywhere" (10).

This framework suggests that if you do not happen to find neoliberalism behind the novel or poem or voting patterns you are examining, it is only because your objects are not yet inhabiting the ultimate or neoliberalism-is-everywhere phase. There are laggards, but that is the endpoint toward which the march of history is undoubtedly leading. This single-minded narrative begs the main question that a book on the subject of neoliberalism and literary culture should surely be asking: Has literary culture indeed been taken over by neoliberalism? Neoliberalism could, of course, be a very real thing without it also having taken over.

Any formula of the familiar "X-is-everywhere" or "everything-is-X" genre, offered up as terminus to a conceptual history and as putative description of the present, will...

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